Here is my ideas for an encounter, this isnt a fully polished idea, if you object to something please provide an explanation, Im not here to angrily argue I think there is room for content like this, and this is coming from a balanced player I`ve been casual for months then cutting edge orange parsing mythic raiding, then only pushing mythic+ or mage tower appearances and then just leveled a character for lore master and played with friends and family.

5 man encounter combining elements of island expeditions and mythic+

No random que system.

% bonus for being in the same guild and tuned around it.

No time limit

Difficulty (scaling) is selected at que as is size of the island aka the length of the run .5hours, 1hour, 1.5hours 2hours etc. (definitely longer though like a 5 man raid length) Weekly lock out for group leader aka if you don’t like it you can’t reset it but you can use another persons key and difficulty. You can extend your lockout.

Affixes following the mythic plus cycle or maybe no affixes.

Random island with varying terrain or single existing zone spawns.

None linear terrain progression

Enemies are made up of a single, enemy race, could be a playable one or an enemy npc race like blood trolls etc or match the zone. (although I don`t really care, if it needs to be tailored to lore or an xpac so be it)

Lieutenant bosses spawn at random locations unmarked on the map so that you must search not just “if its not here it must be there”
All trash pulls its abilities from a massive pool of trash abilities, I mean anything from any dungeon/raid.

All lieutenant bosses pull their abilities from a massive pool of abilities, again from any dungeon/raid. I realize this would require environmental/terrain spawning accordingly to be able to facilitate.

Final bosses spawn in a restricted part of the island, cave, castle, chamber, peak etc and require the “keys” from the lieutenant bosses to access. Final bosses pull their abilities from a massive pool of abilities, again from any dungeon/raid. I realize this would require environmental/terrain spawning accordingly to be able to facilitate.

Take the profession/class buffs from Court of Stars expand it and randomly apply it to the island. Maybe one of your party has the required profession, maybe you don’t fortunately it doesn’t have to be balanced because it is not a race. Add one for everything.

Allow kiting, allow pvp talents, allow people to swap in an alt or replace a dcd player etc. It doesn’t have to be balanced it’s about having fun with 5 friends in a randomly tailored challenging environment that offers unlimited progression and exploration, no wowhead to tell you what every mob does and where it spawns. Pulling a pack each time not knowing what to expect. Yes sometimes it will be easy as pie and some times you are going to have to be super creative and wipe a bunch.

Rewards titan residuum scaling with length of run, and difficulty of run valued at approximately same as time spent raiding/mythic+

Leave titles, rare mounts and achievements to mythic+.

Currency redeemable for pets, cosmetic items, mounts, consumables, tabards and a full set of gear weapons as well as upgrade tokens, targetable and non-rng. All the rewards decaying on old vendors, just make them valued at approximately the same time spent to acquire them through the original means.
Since it’s an rng generated event it can’t be compared for competition and ranking and as a result it isn’t subject to the tight balance restriction of mythic+ and mythic raiding.

It offers its own indefinite progression, with capped ilvl slightly behind only mythic raiding.

The reality is that even if it can be used to “farm” higher ilvl gear, everyone has access to it.

People that don’t want to / can’t do high level keys still aren’t going to do high level keys.

People that don’t want to / can’t do mythic raiding still aren’t going to do mythic raiding.

Players that want to grind out gear from it, great, the people they are competing with are going to do the same.

Raiding can still have azerite traits that make it necessary to get key gear from raiding to progress into mythic, which is the only difficulty where it may spoil the competition.

In Mythic+ it just means that players may have the ilvl to push higher keys, but that doesn’t mean they have the skill too no different than rewards from war-fronts etc.

For me and a bunch of my friends, I just want to be able to log in and grind if I want to grind, compete if I want to compete and rush/not rush through something if I don`t want to.

Thanks, me too. It definitely requires capital investment in terms of development, but it makes use of lots of existing tech and then offers an incredible amount of content with a new learning curve almost every time.

This sounds like an awesome idea and makes great reuse of the island core functions and assets, which I know they’re fans of. Even if not this, I’d love to see some sort of end game content reuse island format. I enjoy the openness of to as opposed to linear requirements of raid and mythic+.